Nature (Erda) as heartless and devoid of feeling like Alberich, its truth something only an egoist (like Alberich) could appeal to:
“… I can’t stand hearing anyone appeal to Nature: with finer minds ‘tis finely meant, but for that very reason something else is meant thereby; for Nature is heartless and devoid of feeling, and every egoist, ay, every monster, can appeal to her example with more cause and warranty than the man of feeling.” [658W-{9/30/58} Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 46]
It is Wotan, the representative of man’s religious impulse, the sinner against Mother Nature, who offers the cheap consolation of illusion instead of truth. Witness Feuerbach, who, paraphrasing Spinoza, stated that:
“… as Spinoza put it, … religion aims solely at the advantage and welfare of man, while philosophy aims at the truth … .” [191F-LER: p. 12]
It may help to convince those otherwise inclined to insist on Erda’s dissimilarity to her alleged advocate Alberich, that we find decisive evidence of Alberich’s identification with her not only in the self-evident fact that her most profound observation in the Ring will be her prophecy of the inevitable victory of Alberich (and his son Hagen) over the gods, the necessity of the twilight of the gods, but also the fact that in S.3.1, during Wotan’s last conference with Erda, he will equate her with fear, his fear of the end she prophesied, and consign her, with all her knowledge, to oblivion, just as he hopes to consign Alberich’s curse on his Ring to oblivion.
As always, Wagner associated Judaism with this cold, scientific, objective way of grasping Mother Nature (Erda), i.e., with Alberich’s sin against himself, our innermost self of feeling, or love. In our following extract, for instance, Wagner says the Jews’ very nature condemns them to the world’s reality, so that they are in effect irredeemable:
“Whether the Jews can ever be redeemed is the question which … occupies our thoughts – their nature condemns them to the world’s reality.” [1071W-{2/10/81} CD Vol. II, p. 618]
The sum of our argument and evidence is that by affirming the real, outer world, Alberich sins only against himself, his inner, subjective self of feeling, for the sake of worldly power, whereas Wotan, by affirming the subjective, inner man of feeling and denying the objective, outer world, sins against Erda and her knowledge of all that was, is, and will be.
We can acquire more understanding of the distinction between Alberich’s sin against himself, and Wotan’s sin against the world, from a somewhat different perspective, in Feuerbach’s following observations. Here he contrasts the Christian God (the model for Wotan), whose faithful worshippers hold him to be autonomous from the chain of natural necessity, of cause and effect, with the pagan god (a model for Alberich), who is bound by nature’s (i.e., Erda’s) necessity:
“The Christian has a free cause of nature, a lord of nature, whose will and word nature obeys, a God who is not bound by the so-called causal nexus, by necessity or by the chain which links effect to cause and cause to cause [Wotan strives to escape the fate woven by Erda’s daughters, the
